Race report Apollo Tri

So Sunday I did my first triathlon. 400m swim, 24km bike and 5km run and it was good!!

 

The getting up in the morning was pretty hard at 4am. Although I’ve been talking to a girl till the early hours for the last few weeks which definatly hasn’t helpped. On the night before she kicked me off to bed at least. but after a few weeks of it, neither of us was asleep so ended up gassing again lol. I was pretty tiered come 4am and an entire mug of ecspresso definatly perked me up though 😉

 

We’d been having amazing weather up in Hull and in the UK, temp in the 20’s ºc. Typically come race day it was 1ºc and we started by scraping ice off the car. We got there really early , I set up transition and after a race brief at half seven I then had to wait for 0944 for my wave. It was strange, I was rocking trackies with my hair tied back and then later a tri suit and I got called “love” and automatically people were pointing me towards the girls toilets etc. I always think I look massivly butch / blokeish like this, but I guess not?

Me talking to my mummy

As the time got closer I’ll be honest, not matter how much preperation I’d done I was beggining to get nervouse,…. hand I trined enough,…. could I do this,… I’m sure I can do this,… yes! given my swimming back ground I ended up going off with all the decent athletes (all of which won veriouse catagories or came second etc) and then there was me,…. was I really in the right catagory???

So my swim came, I pushed off and my right goggle filled with water,…. a-Fking-mazing!! I did two lengths like this and as I breathed on my right (the side that filled) I kept judging it wrong and breathing in water. After two abismal legnths I moved to breathing just on my left. This slowed me down a bit, but hey, I was breathing and I’m pretty sure that helps right?

After the swim I had a 200m run to transition. Now this I was happy with, 40 seconds from crossing the mat, getting to my bike, glasses and helmet on and across the line again, good times 🙂 I ran, hopped on the bike (shoes already attached) and I was away. It was pretty cold still and being wet my suit got cold around my chest pretty dam quick. I’d traind for this on perpose, so lots of short slow breaths later I wasn’t hyper ventalating. I was off. The first 3-4 km all was going swimmingly, a reasonable time and I was kicking out speeds of 35km/h. then I turned at a t-junction to find a car straddeling my lane and coming straight towards me. Now it’s been a while since I’d done physics, but I’m pretty sure that both our speeds and his size would end badly for me. So like any sensible person. I got the fk out of dodge and ended up on the floor rather than under his car. I checked my self over for broken bones, nope all’s good I can stand. I checked the bike over, yep all working still. One final check of my self revealed a nice cut on the palm of my hand, a few patches of road rash, scratches on my legs and a slightly bruised pride. At this point the remiander of my wave passed by. Least they asked if I was ok though 🙂

My hand was gushing a bit, but I thought it’s not bad enough to stop me and I’m sure the wind while I ride will help it clot,…. well apart from a 4-5km up hill section where I was out my seat hanging out my arse, ragging my hands on my drop bars.

Once over the hill though it was a lovely down hill with only a small up hill at the end. My hand was healing nicely in th wind, thank god. I couldn’t imagine getting a “DNF” on my first race I did find my self slowing down because of the crash on a down hill section,… doing 75km/h down hill in skin tight lycra I couldn’t help but think if I came off now it would be a little bit more seriouse :S. The rest of the bike I tried to make up the time a bit but to be honest it took me 56mins and I was far from happy with that time. I do have to say, I seem to have the getting on the bike, the dismount and transition down at least, this time I did a 44 second transition into the run.

The run was a two lap “flat” course minus a small hill at the far end of the loop. It was 5km and burning legs aside I plodded on through it to cross the finish line. It’s safe to say I was pretty shattered, my time was slow because of a mixture of mishaps and nerves and you know what. I loved it. I loved every minuit of the race. From the cold, the wet, the crash. The burning feeling in my legs and lungs. It was like heaven,… call me a sado masachist,…. no really do 😉

Needless to say with a time of 1:32:11 I didn’t win anything. but it was my first race, who would I be kidding if I thought I could have come first and what would there be to aim for if it was all easy right? But I took alot from the race. How things felt, how things works. There are alot of things to work on and rather than being detered I’m already looking at my next race in the end of june.I’m officially a complete triathalon convert 😀

 

And in true calabratory style the girls dragged me out for a “few” drinks on the night that turned into me been awake 23 hours, getting home at 3am just a little,…. ok quiet tipsy and very tiered :S

 

My aero bars turned up today as well so that’s gona be some fun to train with so wish me luck 😀 xxx

T minus 1 week

So it’s one week to the day to my race. Today I got all the prerace brief info so it’s official,… I’m racing and this is happening.

 

I’ve started my pre race phase and it’s a tad boring to say the least. My plan for this week is a casual swim to stretch my arms out and a casual run to stretch my legs out on tuesday. This will leave my body to rest for a week leading up to the race so that (in theory) I’m recovered and at my best on race day. Boring is not the word though I’ve been getting up at 4 every day raring to go and instead, getting up and doing uni work. The mental strength needed this week I think is worse than when I am training because at least then I feel like I’m doing something, where as at the moment I feel like I’m getting up for no reason and then it’s the slippery slope,…. what’s one more hour in bed 😉 God I hate taper

 

Between blasting out a uni assignment this week on the fundermentals of search in artifical intelligence I think there will be a few blog posts to come. There are a few things that I’ve wanted to write about and / or have happened in the last few weeks that I want to blog about,… so you have been warned 😛

 

So for now I’m going to get back to do some research for this paper and consider some sort of carbo loading over this week while I’m at it 🙂 xxx

Transexuals in sport

So I guess this is a  blog post I’ve been putting off really. I mean it’s such a contentious, serious issue and given it’s the main focus of my blog I guess I’ve been wanting to think a lot about the issue and try to cover all the bases as it were.

 

When I first started looking at transitioning I knew I would have to pretty much give up swimming for many reasons. Initially at the early stages using “gender appropriate” changing rooms and costumes was an issue. Do I turn up “in roll” and then change into a male costume? Or do I wear a womans with lumps and bumps in all the wrong places? The local baths I’d been at for some years were really cool about the whole thing luckily and after a chat about how I wasn’t going to use the disabled changing rooms we all came to a middle ground of me using the women’s changing rooms,…. just showering in my costume. I mean we wouldn’t want to give any old ladies a shock 😉 lol.

 

In the end I stopped swimming for a multitude of reasons. Partly because I’d got it into my head that I had to be the grimiest of girls and I wasn’t going to achieve this with having muscles. This now being something I’m learning to live with. I also became very disillusioned with the sport given how long I would be away from competitions. As soon as I outted my self as trans I was no longer able to race as a man, I mean I’d just told them that I wasn’t a man after all. Now here’s the big kick in the nuts (excuse the pun) To compete as a woman has nothing to do with your legal gender in any way shape or form. I have a driving licence and all sorts of documents that say I’m a woman but they mean nothing to governing bodies both nationally and internationally for swimming, running, triathlon, including the Olympic committee. All these bodies have 2 criteria. Firstly that I have had two years on gender appropriate hormones and secondly that I have undergone sexual reassignment surgery.

 

Now the first criteria I can fully understand. I would have a man’s body and be racing against women. In most cases this would offer a VERY unfair advantage given muscle strength, size, power etc and without it being in place people could very easily abuse the situation and all of a sudden you’ve got half a dozen men racing in women’s races. To give you an idea men have testosterone (T) levels of 15-17 and estrogen (E) levels <80 where as in women T is 5-7 and E is 80 – 1000 depending on lots of things. Mine are E 610 and T 0.5. I literally can’t sprint to save my life, I have no explosive power :S. Now my disillusion with the time out from sport comes partly from this though. Ok so you come out and you start on the path to becoming more like the person you are on the inside. It will be a year to a year and a half before you even have hormones mentioned. THEN you have two years to wait.

 

Now the second criteria I hate,… no ,… I loath in that it’s such an archaic approach to gender etc. As stated above you can see I have less testosterone than your average women making it harder for me to compete for many reasons including strength and also things like recovery times and over all energy levels. This makes the entire process an up hill battle in its self and clearly my sex organs aren’t working any more meaning as long as I could prove this surly that’s what matters?

 

This idea that having a penis makes me unelligable to compete is something that is mirrored through out my life. this idea that having a penis makers me a man and thus the lack of it a woman. This can be seen all over but mostly in people’s perceptions of me as a person. the “you’ll be a man untill you get rid”. My usual response is, if you had a car crash and it fell off, would you be a woman or an unhappy man? The having or the lack of is irrelevant in reality for both who I am and also how well I can compete. But hey I don’t make the rules I just have to follow them

 

The other down side of having surgery first is that even if everything goes well I’m looking at a minimum of 3 months recovery time doing literally nothing and then having to build back up very slowly. not to mention issues with chlorine water and sitting on bike seats,… can any one say OWWW?

 

surprisingly in all this though other athletes that I would be competing against and interested race teams don’t seem to care about what’s going on between my legs even if I would beat them in practice and / or on race day. The only people who seem to care are the governing bodies except for the gay games who’s gender identity policy is a lot more relaxed and understanding (guess where I will be going in 2014. Even race organisers have said they wouldn’t have a problem with me racing.

 

The only thing that bothers me really is the extreme double standards for trans men. there is a triathlete in the states who is a trans man and is able to race along side men even though he hasn’t had surgery,…. the reason for this,…. they don’t belive he has a chance of winning against other men. Just because we as trans women could win. Does that mean we should be subjected to the double standard?

 

So I put it to you, the reader as an open debate having been given “the facts”. If you were to swim/bike/run a race and it turned out the winner wasn’t even born the gender they were racing would you feel they deserved it? or more so, would it be right?

Answers on a post card 🙂 xxx

Swim bike run crash

So my knee is on the mend. I’ve been doing some decent running sessions. Only short distances but quality sessions rather than quantity. Today I thought I’d push it a little bit and see how it holds up.

I recently baught a new bike. Nothing special, a Barrossa monsa that cost me £204. It’s a nice little racing road bike for training on once I make a few modifications to the tune of aero bars, drop handel bars and a 78º conversion seat post I’ll be well on the way 😀

Although I have to say, buying off the peg bikes usuall, or at least in my mind come built. Mine on the other hands looked like this

After a day of playing around with it and a few scrapes it looked more like this

So now I have a bike all the kit a kit junkie could need and a knee that is working,…. swim bike run brike set any body?

I got out at 5am as usual today and I’de already got it in my head this was the plan for the morning. Nothing to crueling or hard paced. Nice and steady and just get the feeling of swim to bike, bike to run. I ended up with a mile swim, 10 mile bike and 3 mile run. Was well under two hours, but not 100% sure on time as I was messing about at the pool and gassing with people as you do. It was definatly around the hour and a half mark though and boy did I feel like it.

A funny thing happened to me though on my bike ride. Now I’d heared horror stories about people clipping in for the first time, riding and not being able to get out of them and crashing. I do some spin classes and also had a play at home making sure I knew my way in and out of them rather than figuring it out at a set of traffic lights.

So there I am 6 miles in sweating, working hard and I get to a set of lights. I move down the line past the cars and up to the front. I go to unclip,…. NOTHING!! I panic, I tug, I wobble and then thats it I’m laid on my side in the gutter infront of everyone.  Now this is a reasonably busy “T” junction, with lots of cars about so it’s safe to say I feel like a bit of a tool. But me being me, I just laid there for a few moments laughing out loud, shook my head and after fighting with my feet, got up and waited for the lights to change, then went onto finish my session. I thought I’d been unscaved but, I have a slight scuff on my left hip. Although the pic doesn’t do my first war wound justice if you ask me 😉

Any ways, a day of uni work for me. Between training and my last year I don’t seem to stop xxx